Friday, August 3, 2012

Law and the French Atlantic at the Newberry Library

This year’s Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History is Law and the French Atlantic. It will be held on Friday, October 5, 2012, at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The organizers are Allan Greer (McGill University) and Richard J. Ross (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). They explain:

The French Atlantic has not yet received the sustained attention given to the British and Spanish Atlantic, particularly where the topic of law is concerned. This conference will explore the legal dimension (broadly conceived) of the French Atlantic empire in the early modern period. The variegated and rapidly evolving juridical order of ancien régime France was deeply implicated in the expansion of overseas commerce, the founding of colonies, and the creation of imperial administrations.

Participants may explore topics such as: legal discourse and imperial ideologies; the establishment of colonial jurisdictions in Canada, Louisiana, and the French West Indies; the regulation of slavery; indigenous peoples and the law; the emergence of colonial land tenures; and the legal framework for trade and business enterprise. The organizers wish particularly to encourage comparative approaches that consider more than one French colony and that examine contrasts and convergences with the British, Spanish and Portuguese empires. In according due attention to the distinctive features of French law and the French New World empire, we hope to enrich understandings of Atlantic history generally.

Allan Greer (McGill History) and Richard Ross (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Law and History) organized “Law and the French Atlantic.” The conference is an offering of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History, which gathers yearly under the auspices of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago in order to explore a particular topic in the comparative legal history of the Atlantic world in the period c.1492-1815. Funding has been provided by the University
of Illinois College of Law.

Attendance at the Symposium is free and open to the public. Participants and attendees should preregister by contacting the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library at 312.255.3514, or send an e-mail to renaissance@newberry.org. Papers will be precirculated electronically to all registrants.